LaToya Ruby Frazier

For over two decades, LaToya Ruby Frazier has used photography and her art to preserve forgotten narratives of labor, gender, and race. Her brilliant, eye-opening work explores the post-industrial era, lifting up marginalized voices and the underrecognized work of women and people of color. The Museum of Modern Art is organizing a comprehensive exhibition dedicated entirely to LaToya and her work, which will be on display in 2024. The MoMA’s Acting Chief Curator said that LaToya’s “non-traditional monuments demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played and continue to play within histories of labor and the working class.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s extraordinary body of work includes Flint Is Family: a piercing chronicle of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. LaToya spent five years in a city plagued by poisonous water, documenting the community’s resilience in the face of environmental racism. The original photo essay, for Elle Magazine, was named one of the “25 Most Influential Works of American Protest Art Since World War II” by The New York Times, which called it “a natural extension of her already well-established commitment to social justice.” She collaborated with residents to tell their story and raise funds for a solution, as the project evolved from a photo essay to a video, and now to a 2022 book and exhibition—which celebrate togetherness and family as much as they condemn injustice.

LaToya’s recent work includes The Last Cruze, which documents the devastation of a factory town losing its factory. Designed to resemble a production line, the exhibition follows the workers affected by a General Motors plant shutdown in Lordstown, Ohio, after more than half a century of operation. These unflinching photographs of an exploited working class “speak to the imperative to stay together even and especially when driven apart” (Artforum). LaToya also took portraits of Breonna Taylor’s family for the cover story of Vanity Fair. Alongside the latter project, LaToya penned a moving statement about how crucial it was for her to help the family reclaim visual justice by offering humane and dignified representations of Breonna and her loved ones. “My portraits are a call for justice and the unwavering steadfast endurance of Black women in America regardless of the persecution we face on a daily basis,” she wrote.

In her award-winning first book The Notion of Family, LaToya offers a penetrating look at “the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns.” A haunting photographic account of three generations of Frazier women, the book is simultaneously personal and political: investigating the impact of deindustrialization on working class Black families in the Rust Belt through the “labour-consumed bodies” of her relatives. Her talks, like her breathtaking work, betray a sobering reality: the American dream has not, and does not, work for Black people. As long as environmental injustice, healthcare inequality, and economic racism continue to thrive, the country is failing its Black citizens. With clarity and insight, LaToya shines a light on how art can be used as a tool for transformation and social good across the nation.

In 2020, LaToya was selected as one of nine Storytelling Fellows for National Geographic. She has received the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She was chosen by Ebony as one of their 100+ Most Powerful Women of All Time. Her work has been exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Seattle Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. LaToya also shot an aerial photography series depicting Memphis, Baltimore, and Chicago in The Atlantic’s Martin Luther King issue, as well as the movie posters for the Grand Prix-winning Spike Lee film BlacKkKlansman, which tells the true story of an American detective who infiltrated the Colorado Springs KKK. LaToya is the Associate Professor, Photography, at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has previously held academic and curatorial positions at Yale University School of Art, Rutgers University, and Syracuse University.